For all of the years we've talked about the gaming-hardware company Razer and its range of expensive and (sometimes) remarkably thin gaming laptops, we've rarely put those "Blade" machines through extensive testing. The Razer Blade line debuted in 2011 with a flashy multitouch panel that had a screen inside of it—which, at the time, was the most Pimp My Ride tweak we'd ever seen in a laptop. ("Yo dogg, I heard you like screens, so we put a screen... in your trackpad!")

But we passed that one up, along with most other Razer laptops, except for its 2016 not-quite-gaming entry, the Razer Stealth. As the company has settled into a steadier track record, we wanted to take an opportunity to see where Razer's purest gaming laptop line has come now that its Blade Pro variant—which has a 17" screen but a body that's still reasonably thin—has a model just a hair shy of $2,000. If you want Razer laptop features like a side-aligned trackpad and a customizable, color-mapped keyboard on your gaming-ready, 17-inch laptop, this means you no longer have to pay for Razer's whopping $3,999 version of the same model.

Our verdict? For a 17-inch gaming laptop, the Blade Pro FHD model is totally fine, and if you want that size in an impressively slim body at a $2,000 price point, this one comes with reasonable compromises. But unlike its insanely priced sibling, this Blade Pro UHD model struggles to excite us enough to recommend it—and its price tag—over cheaper and similarly powered gaming laptops.

Pro frame rate, not pro specs

Say "hello!" to the Razer Blade Pro FHD.

It's very, very difficult to make out this "Blade" text as etched into the bottom bezel.

Unboxing time.

A cult, huh?

Stickers and assurances.

The central stumbling point, quite frankly, is the screen. It's just not the stunner you might want or expect when opting for a laptop as huge as this one.

The "FHD" in the model name refers to the screen's 1080p resolution, which isn't itself a bad aspect—though you might wish you were getting more resolution, considering that many competitive 13-inch laptops offer 1440p resolutions and beyond. The perk with this "only" 1080p screen, then, is a surprise 120Hz refresh rate. That's double the standard 60Hz you'll find on most laptop panels.

That sounds like an awesome trade, right? 120Hz monitors are uncommon in gaming laptops, and the jump to a higher frame rate is often worth a trade in gaming attributes like geometry, shaders, shadows, pixels, and so on. Just by dialing back a few settings, you can presumably enjoy a silkier frame rate, which is particularly lovely stuff in genres like first-person shooters.

But the Blade Pro FHD's 17-inch, 1080p, 120Hz monitor is missing one key bullet point in that list of attributes: variable refresh rate. (Conversely, the more expensive Blade Pro 4K includes G-Sync technology.) And with just enough power lacking, that's a slight problem here, at least for the price of this system.

Unlike a desktop system with power and overclock headroom to spare, the Blade Pro UHD opts for the slowest of last year's Kaby Lake i7 mobile processors, the i7-7700HQ, with a "turbo" clock maximum of 3.8GHz and other notebook-related limitations. Should you simply want to lock into a 60fps refresh at 1080p resolution, that kind of notebook processor will do the trick, and the system's GTX 1060 notebook version, complete with 6GB GDDR5 RAM, is a perfectly fine match for that graphics profile at medium-high settings.

But 120Hz gaming is more CPU-bound. As a result, when you slap a game onto the Blade Pro UHD and aim for that max refresh, you may very well not reach it, which instead leads to screen tearing and frame rate spikes. Some players don't mind these, but they absolutely reduce the smoothness expected of a monitor with such a refresh rate. G-Sync and Freesync monitors address the natural frame rate variance you can expect from modern games as they strive for 120Hz and beyond. Their explosions and other effects can trigger frame rate spikes on even solid systems, let alone ones at the same power level as the Blade Pro FHD.

My best example came from testing PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, a shooting game that is admittedly unoptimized but that can also scale down on PC to reach decent frame rates. But I simply couldn't get there at full 1080p resolution. I dropped the settings to PUBG's lowest visual preset—with some of the ugliest textures known to humanity, along with awful vegetation rendering and other visual hiccups—and still never reached a consistent refresh above 95fps. It was usually closer to 85fps.

And that winds up being the issue with games from the modern era: they're not going to hit 120Hz on this monitor. That's totally acceptable in terms of the Blade Pro FHD's specs, and you can reach perfectly fine 60Hz performance without frame rate spikes or visual tearing. But if you want the full potential from this notebook, in terms of its power-and-screen combo, you'll need to step back to less demanding games—your Counter-Strikes, your Rocket Leagues, and your Dota 2s, which can all lock above 120Hz on this system with settings dialed down. If you're cool with paying for that specific portable perk, then the Razer Blade Pro is for you.

Beyond that, the screen is a standard-issue IPS panel, and unfortunately it comes straight from the factory with a noticeable blue tint. At a maximum luminance of 297 nits, the panel certainly doesn't have major brightness on its side; the maximum is fine, but you'll wish you had a little more at a particularly bright coffee shop.